Type Museum

The Type Museum is a unique and massive collection of artefacts representing the legacy of type founding in England, whose famous type foundries and composing systems supplied the world with type in all languages. The museum was founded in 1992 and is located in Oval, south London, England. It closed to the public in 2006 because of a failure to incorporate, lack of operating funds and financial security. It has since rebranded itself as The Type Archive the old website is defunct and the http://www.typearchive.org/ is the new version fronting the same charity.

The Type Museum is the final repository of many of the original forms, punches, matrices and patterns of some of the most famous and successful metal and wood type foundries in the world. It also holds a historic collection of presses. It is estimated that the collections include between five and eleven million artefacts.

The Museum's collection is unique in holding examples of successive generations of technology used for type design and manufacture, from hand foundry and machine composition, through wood type, to photography and film setting (which laid the foundation for today's digital typography).

In addition to holding its collections, it is a working museum that manufactures matrices for letterpress printing. The Museum has become a valuable educational resource for many colleges, and helps to meet the demand for an educational and experimental type workshop.

According to the Museum's website:

[The Museum's holdings include] punches, matrices and moulds from the principal eighteenth- and nineteenth-century London type foundries, complemented by business archives and by one of the world's best collections of type specimen books.

Cataloguing and conservation of a major collection, acquired from Stephenson Blake in 1996, is currently being undertaken with the aid of a grant from The Pilgrim Trust.

Since 1995 the collection has been housed in Stockwell, in a range of industrial buildings built between 1895 and 1905 as a veterinary hospital.

[The Museum's] mission is to collect, preserve and interpret the historic artefacts associated with the spread of the printed word and image, throughout the world, and to place them in the context of modern technology and design and of the far longer history of mankind's use of graphic symbols.

[The Museum's] first goal has been to preserve the means of making type. The Type Museum has been able, with the support of the National Heritage Memorial Fund, to acquire key collections documenting the principal chapters in the history of type in Britain

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